Word: deductionism
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That program is the corporate tax deduction for business entertainment, which subsidizes the fabled "threemartini lunches." Although it isn't ordinarily considered a welfare program, the travel and entertainment ("T and E") deduction works exactly like one. Corporations can deduct 80 percent of the cost of their executives' expense account...
JUST like a welfare program, this deduction represents a cost to the government that the rest of us pay for through higher taxes. Unlike welfare programs, however, the benefits of this handout go to people who don't need them.
And the cost is huge. A 1985 study estimates that corporations bought 12 percent of the alcohol sold at retail in that year. The cost to the government of deducting all those martinis was approximately $5 billion. Compare that to the $5.6 billion that former President Ronald W. Reagan proposed...
Every attempt to introduce some measure of fairness into the deduction has met with protests about the "sanctity of home ownership." Mondale went so far as to call the mortgage interest deduction "the only deduction that is in the tax law that does any good at all for the average...
The problem with the deduction is that the "average American" gets precious little out of it. You could scarcely imagine a system that distributes housing assistance as regressively as does the mortgage interest deduction.